The morning of 5 May 1935 smelled of dust, spring grass and engine oil. On a new airfield outside Ankara, the young Turkish Republic was opening a flight school with the kind of ceremony it loved best: gliders wheeling against the Anatolian sky, foreign parachutists blooming white above the crowd, and, at the centre of it all, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, watching his country learn to look up.

Beside him stood a slight woman of twenty-two with dark, serious eyes. She was his adopted daughter, and the parachutes undid her completely. Atatürk noticed. Would she like to jump too? Before the day was out, the president had instructed the school's director to enrol her as its first female student.

Her name was Sabiha Gökçen, and the name itself was a kind of prophecy. Atatürk had chosen the surname for her only six months earlier, when Turkey's new Surname Law required one: Gökçen, from gök — "of the sky." She had never touched an aircraft. Within two years she would be, by Guinness World Records' reckoning, the first woman in history to fly a fighter in combat — a distinction that carries both glory and a shadow.

A documentary portrait of Sabiha Gökçen, from Bursa orphan to record-setting aviator.

An Orphan at the President's Door

She was born in Bursa on 22 March 1913, in the last exhausted years of the Ottoman Empire, to Mustafa İzzet Bey and Hayriye Hanım — a family, by the official account, of Bosniak origin. Both parents died while she was a child, and she was raised in poverty by her brother. Then, in 1925, the founder of the Republic came to Bursa on an official visit, and a twelve-year-old girl did something remarkable: she asked permission to speak with him.

What she wanted was an education — a place at boarding school. What she got was a family. Struck by her nerve and moved by her circumstances, Atatürk asked her brother's permission to take her to the Çankaya presidential residence in Ankara, where she joined the several other daughters he had adopted. She studied at the Çankaya Primary School and later at the Üsküdar American Academy in Istanbul.

It is worth pausing on how deliberate this was. Atatürk had no biological children; he adopted daughters and raised them as public arguments — living proof of what the new, secular, westernising Republic intended for its women. In 1934, Turkish women won the full right to vote and stand for parliament, ahead of France and Switzerland. The president's daughters were expected to embody the point. None of them would embody it quite like Sabiha.

Turkish Bird

At Türkkuşu — "Turkish Bird," the civil aviation school of the Turkish Aeronautical Association — she trained first as a glider pilot and parachutist, then was sent with seven male classmates to the Soviet Union, to Crimea, for an advanced course in powered flight. The trip broke off in grief: in Moscow she learned that her adoptive sister Zehra had died, and she returned to Turkey and withdrew from the world for a time. It was Atatürk who insisted she climb back into a cockpit. On 25 February 1936 she flew a powered aircraft for the first time.

Turkey's war academies did not admit women, so Atatürk simply routed around them. A personalised uniform was made; a special eleven-month programme was arranged at the military aviation school at Eskişehir for the academic year 1936-37. Afterwards she spent six months with the 1st Airplane Regiment at Eskişehir airbase, flying bombers and fighters alongside commissioned officers.

In 1937 she flew in the Aegean and Thrace military exercises and drew praise for her airmanship. Then, that summer, came the assignment that made her a record-holder — and the one that history weighs very differently now.

The Shadow of Dersim

In 1937 and 1938 the Turkish state waged a brutal campaign against a rebellion in Dersim, a remote eastern region populated largely by Kurdish Alevis. Aircraft flew sortie after sortie against villages as well as fighters, and thousands of people — combatants and civilians — were killed or deported. Gökçen flew bombing missions in those operations; a General Staff report noted the "serious damage" caused by her 50-kilogram bomb. For her performance she received a commendation and the Turkish Aeronautical Association's first jewelled Murassa Medal.

She said those words herself, to the newspaper Milliyet, in 1956 — without apparent regret. There is no honest way to tell her story around this chapter, and Turkey itself has begun to say so: in 2011, then prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued a formal apology for Dersim, calling it "one of the most tragic events of our near history."

So the world's first female combat pilot earned the title in a campaign against her own country's civilians. Both facts are true at once. The Turkish press of 1937 saw only the first, and crowned her "The Flying Girl" — the airborne face of the Republic's new woman.

The Flying Girl

In June 1938 she flew a five-day tour of the Balkan capitals to enormous acclaim, collecting decorations from Yugoslavia and Romania along the way. It was aviation as diplomacy, and she was superb at it: composed, photogenic, faultlessly precise in the air.

That same year she was appointed chief trainer of the Türkkuşu flight school, a post she held into the mid-1950s, sitting on the association's executive board and personally training four female aviators. By the time she gave up flying in 1964, she had logged around 8,000 hours. In 1981 she published her memoir, A Life Along the Path of Atatürk.

The honours kept arriving long after the propellers stopped. The FAI awarded her its Gold Air Medal in 1991. In 1996 the United States Air Force put her on its poster of the twenty greatest aviators in history — the only woman among them.

Names and Silences

In January 2001, Istanbul opened its second airport and named it Sabiha Gökçen International. She lived just long enough to see it: she died of heart failure in Ankara on 22 March 2001 — her 88th birthday. Today her name is spoken over tannoys by millions of travellers who may know nothing else about her.

Three years after her death, her story acquired one more contested layer. In February 2004 the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos published an article by editor Hrant Dink, in which a woman named Hripsime Sebilciyan claimed to be Gökçen's niece — and that Gökçen was born an Armenian orphan taken from an orphanage after the genocide. The mainstream daily Hürriyet picked the story up, and the reaction was ferocious: the Turkish General Staff declared the debate an abuse of "national values," and her adoptive sister Ülkü Adatepe insisted on the official account. The claims remain unproven and disputed; what is not disputed is the ugliness they exposed. Dink was assassinated by a nationalist gunman in 2007, and many observers count the Gökçen affair among the events that painted the target on him.

Even her famous record carries a footnote — France's Marie Marvingt flew bombing missions in 1915, and Russia's Evgeniya Shakhovskaya flew military reconnaissance a year earlier, though neither as a trained fighter pilot, which is why Guinness gives Gökçen the title. Perhaps that is the fitting summary of Sabiha Gökçen: every superlative about her requires a second sentence. This week, with Turkish air power back in the headlines over the F-35, it is worth remembering where that story began — with an orphan from Bursa who asked a president for an education and was handed the sky.

Period footage: Gökçen herself recounts her memories of Atatürk.

Sources: Wikipedia, Guinness World Records, Runway Girl Network, Turkish Air Force archived biography, Milliyet (1956), BBC News